What effect do these adjectives from A Christmas Carolhave on the reader? Scrooge is "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous,...

First, those particular adjectives have fairly negative connotations. They give the
reader the impression that Scrooge is desperate in a lot of ways. Take the phrase "grasping
at straws," for instance. That's a hopeless image; as is someone who is "scraping the
bottom" of something. There is nowhere lower for that person to go.

It
might be interesting to discuss these words as they relate to advertising techniques. Two
advertising techniques stand out to me. The first is the name calling technique: an effective
way to get somebody to admire your product is to insult the competition. If readers are meant to
view Cratchit as positive, then it makes sense to insult his "competition." The other
advertising technique that comes to mind is something called "card stacking." Card
stacking occurs when an advertiser expounds benefit after benefit about a product. In general,
card stacking uses positive associations, but there is no reason a writer can't stack the deck
against someone or something...